Mnemomap Presentation

Mnemomap does a live, interactive search with lots of integrated data sources – much fancier than the simple list you get back from regular search engines. It provides a “mind map” view of the results and relations to other terms. Out of this map you can create filters to be applied to Yahoo, Flickr and YouTube.

This was a cool international presentation. Simon presenting in English from Germany (at 04:00 in the morning!) with Tim here in Palo Alto operating the slides. It was a double demo; since there were a few folks from jajah.com here, we used Jajah to do the call setup to Simon's phone and the speakerphone here.

Mnemomap Questions

Q: Are you integrating with any browsers?
A: No plans, but we're interested.

Jajah questions

Q: conference calls?
A: yes, starting tomorrow

Q: do you record the calls?
A: no

Q: pricing?
A: most free, but if you call a non-jajah user, it's at VOIP rates
A: for example, this call with Simon and us, 13.5 minutes, cost 0.28 euros

Gernot

multimedia content in XML feeds

“Concept and prototypical implementation of an XML-aggregator for multimedia content”: I’ll be giving an overview of my diploma thesis and some of concepts I developed. I’ll probably focus on the aggregation of what I call “universal content” and techniques to automatically handle information overflow.

Could use additional metadata to determine most important things going on, and present top 20 to users

Introducing “James”

“personal information butler”

Q: Is it available for download?
A: No, not yet; will run on Leopard in spring

Q: Only available for Mac users?
A: Only on Mac, depends on a lot of the built-in frameworks, infrastructure (calendar, address book, RSS aggregation), APIs

Q: How will you distribute it?
A: Currently a desktop app instead of a web app. When finished, it should work like Google News, except personalized on your own machine. Needs to be available offline, when I have a little spare time to read the topmost important things. I think the future of web2.0 is that desktop apps and web apps will share data and operation.

Q: Any business aspirations / goals?
A: Cocoa development (done)
A2: diploma (done)
A3: get a job
A4: release this and get really really rich

There should be a single tool that abstracts the common structure of all documents/knowledge and lets you navigate it.

“Latency matters.” How many people write paper letters vs. emails?

Granular addressability, scrolling to “S” in 2 seconds, vs. ~100 ms to get right there.

Hyperscope

constrain design to replicate original experience of hypertext

immerse ourselves in the original design, then innovate later

first two months we just dog-fooded the original tool, we were all converted

our hyperscope runs in browsers, and replicates the original experience

“viewspec”, an address

high-level, granular addressibility

transclusion: including the hyperlinked resource inside the hyperlink

an <img> which shows the resource behind the src attribute in the HTML page

Hyperscope release party, September 5th – be there or be square!

demo

viewspecs

purple numbers

Hyperscope team needs:

web design

logo

small image of a dancing hula girl (maybe via Peter Theony???)

file transformers

see the “ways to contribute” section on the web site

Q: who's “we”
A: Doug, funding from NSF, Eugene, Christina Engelbart, Brad, Craig, Jonathan Cheyer
A: we're the kick-off team, but we want people to join the community and work on the code and the system and the conversations

Q: documents have to be in a special syntax?
A: yes, OPML

Q: the reason the bible chapter/verse thing works is because the document is static. how does this paradigm work as the document gets edited?
A: in the original augment system, there are 3 kinds of addresses, including hierarchical identifiers. hierarchical identifiers address by position, so they refer to different information if the document changes you also need immutable and persistent addresses. in the original augment, those were node identifiers (like purple numbers).

Comment (Brad Neuberg): the keystrokes seems esoteric at first, but they quickly become natural, and now i feel frustrated when working with regular documents

Q: are documents meant to be shared and passed around?
A: yes

Q: granularity: can you address finer than a paragraph
A: in original Augment, yes; in first release of Hyperscope, no